European scientists have developed a brain implant capable of receiving signals from more than 16,000 mammalian brain cells , and sending messages back to several hundred cells. (Learn more about Brain-Computer Interfaces in my previous post.)

This is a dramatic improvement over the previous state-of-the-art BrainGate technology which allowed some one hundred neural connections.

In addition to the number of connections allowed, the new technology is more "embedded", in that transistors and other components are inside the implant itself, and changes were made to the neurons themselves. This compared to BrainGate, which is really just a tiny set of probes, with all the processing done in a back-end computer.

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